A brand’s flagship store serves many purposes beyond its role as a point of sale.
It is a space in which consumers can experience the brand directly, rather than in a mixed-brand environment. The store’s location, often on a well-known street, lends credibility.
For luxury retailers the street name itself can also position the brand and create helpful associations by way of proximity. For mass-market brands, the location often has sizeable footfall numbers that create a valuable advertising opportunity. An increasing number of retailers view these benefits as significant enough to justify opening flagships that are loss leaders based on in-store sales.
Within the short-term retail space, we see brands of every shape and size coming through Appear Here and they often have very different objectives for their appearances. Some are major brands launching a new product or doing experiential advertising. Others are entrepreneurs launching a new business. Still others are established brands trialling new concepts or locations.
Bricks and sticks brands
Recently we have also seen the rise of a new category of retailers employing a “bricks and sticks” strategy that could best be described as going on tour, not unlike a turn-of-the century trunk dealer. These brands tend to appear in a given location for three to six months. They pick locations around London that each have a unique audience and they are on our site constantly looking for new and interesting locations for their next store.
One brand that is adopting this strategy is M-24, a London-based retailer that specialises in bags and accessories made from recycled truck tarpaulin. The company was founded in 2012 by then 24-year-old Mat Dusting, hence M-24. The brand has adopted a variety of non-traditional marketing channels, including giving a free bag to a top-level parkour runner who shared an image of the bag with his social media reach of more than 100,000 followers. Within that marketing mix, Mat says, “pop-up shops play a big part, especially when driving sales at key moments during the year. They’re a great way of building a stronger community around my brand.”
The brands tend to have a few things in common – most are founded by people in their 20s who are digital natives. They also will often have a retail fit-out that has been specifically designed to be easy to fold up, throw in a truck and move to the next location. They all, without fail, have great websites that serve as their true flagships.
Website as flagship store
This model, in which the brand’s website is the flagship, e-commerce is a major point of sale and physical retail concepts go on tour, is increasingly the way we see new brands being built. The tour itself accomplishes many of the things that a flagship would previously have done – it advertises, builds the brand and showcases the product that can be bought in-store, or, increasingly, online.
